6. Intuitive Insight in the Happy and Serious Hours of Life

What I have just explained is easier said than done in life. But when a person brings their I into the course of fate, then the question of fate becomes something quite different from what it usually is in ordinary life. Then it becomes something alive in life, then it kindles forces in us. Just as knowledge empties our soul and divine spiritual forces can flow into us, so that we can feel empowered, so now — while the ego was otherwise empty for the events of fate — by we carry our ego out into destiny, into this ego flows that which passes through death and birth, which leads us back to earlier earthly lives and shows us how this present earthly life is the starting point for newer earthly lives. There is no other way by which man can become one with his eternal nature and being, which passes through births and deaths, than to become one with the current of fate, to become one through the realization that we have often prepared our fate in the past, and that we have prepared our fate for this existence in our previous lives. We become one with that which connects us inwardly with the soul and the spirit. While otherwise we are a person who, as it were, swims in a boat on an endless sea and knows nothing but what is going on in this boat or in its immediate vicinity, through spiritual knowledge the person experiences that in this sea there is not only one boat; but he sees many boats going in one direction, many boats going in the other direction, and he then knows that his life in this one boat – between birth and death – lasts for a certain period of time, but that he is then, released from the forces that bind him to life in this boat, going through a life in the spiritual world, but after some time he is in another boat again – as he knows that he was in another boat before. Just as one would be insecure if one felt tied only to the one boat, but becomes secure when one knows that one can flee from one boat to the other at a certain time, so life in the eternal stream of existence becomes secure when we place ourselves in the midst of fate in such a way that we identify ourselves with fate in our own selves. What we experience in life, what comes to us as our karma, as our destiny, becomes what we have become in life. We learn to recognize the question of fate as the question of our soul's perfection. We then say to ourselves: If you experience suffering, pain, failure, then these sufferings, pains, failures penetrate your soul, make it stronger in that part where the conscious forces are, and you go with the strengthened soul through the gate of death and enter another life with the strengthened forces. If the question of fate is otherwise one that spreads darkness over life for us, it becomes a question of perfection for our soul as soon as we permeate it with spiritual knowledge; and inner peace pours over life when we are thus able to approach the question of fate. One can say: Whatever can confront man in life, whatever life necessarily demands of man, all this appears in a new light, and man confronts all this with a new strength when he enables the entry of the divine spiritual powers into his soul by filling the conscious part of his soul with spiritual knowledge. Therefore, spiritual knowledge is not mere theoretical knowledge, not something we absorb only in concepts and ideas; but by absorbing them in concepts and ideas, we make our soul into something else. We do not “prove” the immortality of the soul through spiritual science, but by devoting ourselves to spiritual science, we prepare the soul in such a way that it experiences itself in its living nature and thus experiences its immortality. Spiritual science gives the human soul a new life, a resurrected life.